Gustavo Dudamel, whom Reuters calls "the hottest thing to hit classical music in years," has been wowing Los Angeles audiences in his first concerts as music director-designate of the Los angeles Philharmonic. Appropos of that, here's a column I wrote last year for a local print publication regarding "El Sistema," the music education program that helped birth classical music's new superstar.

American educators, it seems, could learn a few things from Venezuela:

Music education is all too often thought of as “fluff.” This was the actual word I heard used in conversation recently by a Valley educator: “Fluff.” What was not fluff according to him? Math, science, English and history. And the last two, I suspected, were only admissible if by “English” one meant the minimum skills required to read, and by “History” the story of which large groups of people long ago killed which other large groups of people. And why. Maybe.

What good is music education, anyway? You learn a few piano pieces, or sing with some friends. Maybe you’re lucky enough to learn to play a string or wind instrument in a band or orchestra, but you probably put it aside after a while. After all, it’s not exactly the hip thing to do.

What can music education do beyond diverting us for a few moments?

Do you really want to know?

It can change the lives of whole communities. Take the example of El Sistema, the astonishingly successful music education system in Venezuela. (Those with negative political feelings about Venezuela can retire them. El Sistema was begun long before Socialist Hugo Chavez came to power, and has been embraced by every political group in that country.)

El Sistema is a music education network that offers free classical music instruction and the free use of instruments to any Venezuelan child. Starting with only 11 students in 1975, there are now 270,000 young musicians in 220 youth orchestras across Venezuela, thanks to El Sistema. “The System” emphasizes performing in front of audiences right from the start, and with great success. It has placed musicians in major symphony orchestras all over the globe. The man named as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel, is an El Sistema graduate.

For most of those 270,000, of course, a career in classical music won’t happen. So, what do they get out of it? Musician and economist Jose Antonio Abreu founded the system with a simple idea in mind. An article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper sums up that idea:

“That in the poorest slums of the world, where the pitfalls of drug addiction, crime and despair are many, life can be changed and fulfilled if children can be brought into an orchestra to play the overwhelmingly European classical repertoire.”

A crazy notion, proven not-so crazy. Google “el sistema music Venezuela” and you will find story after story in various publications, most of them British, of students practicing Mozart and leading optimistic lives who were in jail or on their way to it just a few years ago. It’s about music, but it’s about more than music, because music – despite what you may hear from people afraid of certain truths – is more than organized sound that either pleases or displeases us. Javier Moreno, El Sistema’s current general manager, explains this in a quote taken from an interview in another Brit newspaper, The Independent:

“We’re interested in creating citizens with all the values they need to exist in society: responsibility, teamwork, respect, cooperation and work ethic. Maestro Abreu sums it up perfectly. He says an orchestra is the only group where people get together to reach agreements and they reach those agreements producing something beautiful.”

1) Classical music is a dead art, made by elite white men for other elite white men. Clearly, the racially blended poor children of Venezuela disprove that.
2) There’s no difference in value between one kind of music and another, except for personal taste. If that were the case, then the children of Caracas wouldn’t need El Sistema to elevate their spirits and lift them from drug addiction. They’d use the music already at hand in the streets to elevate their spirits. Hip-hop would work just as well, right?

El Sistema is still barely known about in the United States. While periodicals abroad have published article after article about its success, hardly any US ink has yet to be spilled to publicize this musical miracle from South America. Nor does there seem to be much interest in implementing El Sistema’s principles in our country. More than two dozen countries have started programs that imitate El Sistema, but there is no move to do so here.

Bless the Internet. If not for it, I wouldn't have met "the Rush Limbaugh of music criticism"...me.

In 1993, writing for the Phoenix Gazette newspaper, I penned some commentary on musicologist Richard Taruskin's commentary about Peter Sellars' stagings of Mozart's operas. (An aside: Try to imagine a daily newpaper - the New York Times doesn't count - paying someone to write such a thing in the year 2008. Unless linked somehow to Britney or Paris, such musings would be spiked.) In it, I objected to what I called Taruskin's "tired, neo-Marxist attempt to make music the slave of history."

I thought that was the end of it. Nope.

Perusing the Internet last week, I discovered that Taruskin had struck back. On p. 271 of his book, Essays on Music and Performance, published in 1996, he quoted my article and dismissed its author with the aforementioned label. To be fair, he quoted me at some length, and accurately, but why he insisted on zinging me with that anti-accolade I cannot guess. The logic is elusive. Because someone wearies of outdated academic viewpoints, it follows that he favors illegal wars, the "Patriot" act, and corporate welfare?

There's hardly room for detailing the reasons for my objection to Taruskin's intellectual frame. Suffice it to say that, when the arts are made mere tools of historical inevitability, their real value is grossly deflated. I hope that doesn't make me the "Dr. Laura" of music criticism.

It's dangerous to post anything on April 1, given the date's identification with fools and practical jokes. But I was browsing the Internet and re-discovered Arizona State University's podcast of my sole (so far) String Quartet, titled "Transformations," as performed in its premiere by the Chicago String Quartet, back in 2003. Since no other performing quartet has expressed interest in my score, this may be the only way anyone will ever have of hearing it. And so, for those who may find it appealing, appalling, or at the very least worth a listen, here's the link:

http://www.azpbs.org/kbaq/podcasts.htm#

Warning: The podcast opens with several minutes of commentary by Yours Truly. You may wish to mix a martini while I chatter, then settle down for the 25-minute work.

Finding the podcast, I was also reminded how enthusiastic was the review, written by Richard Nilsen for the online edition of Musical America. Here's an excerpt:

"Transformations" is a 23-minute, 5 movement quartet in which each movement maintains a distinct character while never seeming out of place in the style of the whole.

The movements each use one of the classical forms: the first is a sonata, the second a theme and variations, the third a scherzo -- and this time with a real joke in it -- the fourth a Lento and the finale a fugue.

But none is a simple version of its form. The fugue does not, for instance, offer its entries at the fifth, but at various steps of the scale. It is a jaunty fugue with a them that is part jig, part chromatic descending line. The Scherzo is a play on the Circle of Fifths, and the joke is how to get off this infinite progressions of tonalities. LaFave actually raises a chuckle with his solution.

But the prize of the quartet is the theme and variations, a beautiful melody that might very well be a candidate for a "greatest hits" album. It has something of the gentle swagger of Gershwin's "Lullaby" for quartet, but with a modal feel. It's distinctly memorable chord progressions make following the variations a snap, but the progressions are exceptionally expressive.

One can imagine this movement finding a life of its own, away from the quartet as a whole.

LaFave's voice shows through the whole quartet. It shares the tonal vocabulary of its time -- a time when tonality has had a resurrection -- but never seems derivative. At no point does the listener think: "I've heard that before."

"Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, ahistorical accidents, soon forgotten."

Criticism that is "meditative background" is not the usual "criticism" done in most American newspapers and magazines, which tends to consist of thumbs-up/thumbs-down reactions. It is the broader, more ideas-oriented work done by increasingly fewer American critics (of which Terry Teachout is a positive example). At its highest, such criticism is actually philosophy, though criticism-as-philosophy is rarely encouraged in the United States outside the cloistered world of academics.

For such work to exist and to fulfill Kundera's requirement as "meditative background" in any meaningful way, another element must exist: The work must reach a very broad readership and be accepted by this readership as intellectually valid. This, I fear, is where the move from print-based criticism to blog-based criticism does a disservice to the role of criticism. Blog-based criticism tends to be niche-oriented rather than addressed to the general culture. It mediates among true believers in a certain genre, style or format, and rarely ventures general statements. This only serves further to isolate works from one another as well as from history.

What is needed, from where I sit, is a criticism that connects the dots of our niche-crazy culture, averring broad universal statements based on stubborn particulars, and which reaches and provides context for a significantly large sampling of people who accept it. That would provide meaningful framework of the sort that keeps works from becoming "isolated gestures" and "ahistorical accidents."

Center Dance Ensemble in Phoenix recently commissioned me to write a brief history of the American musical theater in connection with a program of new dance works performed to excerpts from musicals.
The challenge was to convey the origins, the growth, the dynamism, the foibles and the potential of the musical in the form of a mini-history. The result was printed in the program for Center Dance's concert, and is reprinted below.

THE MUSICAL: An Overview

Opera sprang into existence overnight in Italy around 1600, when composers decided to emulate what they mistakenly thought was the through-sung mode of ancient Greek drama. American musical theater, on the other hand, grew up over decades in ragtag style, taking influences from every corner of the immigrant country of its origin.

The American musical was officially born Sept. 12, 1866, at Niblo’s Garden, a 3200-seat theater at the corner of Broadway and Prince in lower Manhattan. That night saw the opening of The Black Crook, a hodge-podge of story, songs, and ballet. Producer William Wheatley had acquired the rights to an uninspired melodrama by Charles M. Barras. Wheatley tossed in some songs to dress up Barras’ obvious and derivative plot about the struggle between Stalacta, Fairy Queen of the Golden Realms, and Hertzog, a crook-backed black magician, for the soul of young Rodolphe. When another New York theater that was supposed to present a Parisian ballet troupe burned to the ground, Wheatley invited the dancers to Niblo’s and simply stuck them – and the sets they were touring with – into the show. The first musical was essentially a mistake, an inadvertent combination of unrelated singing, dancing and storytelling, replete with spectacular sets and half-clad women.

New York loved it. The Black Crook ran for over a year and was revived eight times before the end of the century. Shows like it sprang up overnight. In theaters on and around Broadway, newly affluent, post-Civil War New Yorkers took in the form eagerly. It didn’t matter that story, song and dance failed to relate, only that the hunger for show-biz glitz was fulfilled. Ticket-buyers got their moneys’ worth with shows that lasted five-plus hours.

Musicals from the last half of the 19th century are now forgotten, as are the songs written for them. It took a feisty son of Irish immigrants to galvanize musical comedy songwriting and pen the first enduring Broadway show tunes. George M. Cohan was born to a family of entertainers who traveled America’s rugged touring-show circuits. As one of the Four Cohans, young George longed to leave the road behind and hit Broadway. After several near-misses, Cohan hit huge in 1904 with Little Johnny Jones, a show that boasted two of his biggest hits: “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Unlike the patchworks that had gone before, Little Johnny Jones at least tried to make story, song and dance cohere. Even so, a great deal of the dialogue depended on Vaudeville bits Cohan had picked up on tour.

The integration of book (script), music and lyrics (and sometimes dance) took a very long time to happen. The next step came with the Princess Theatre shows of Jerome Kern, intimate musicals written between 1915 and 1920 for the tiny Princess Theatre. The Princess’ size made impossible the big sets and technical effects so popular in other shows, forcing Kern and lyric writer Guy Bolton to concentrate on believable stories, memorable tunes and witty lyrics. Except, however, for Very Good, Eddie (1915), none of the Princess shows has ever had an effective contemporary revival, owing to dated story lines. The music had an impact, though, bringing a more sophisticated sound onto the Broadway stage. One of Kern’s early songs, “They Didn’t Believe Me,” is today considered the first modern love ballad.

Broadway and popular music were synonymous in the early 20th century and would remain so until the 1960s, when rock ‘n’ roll forced the two apart. In the 1920s through the 1950s, “Tin Pan Alley” produced songwriters who provided both songs for public consumption and songs for the stage. Sometimes a songwriter penned both music and lyrics, but more often songwriting involved a composer-lyricist team. Among the great songwriting teams that fed both the theater and the burgeoning recording and radio industries was that of George and Ira Gershwin. George Gershwin (1898-1937) evinced a natural talent that burst on the scene with his first hit song, “Swanee” (lyric by Irving Caesar). Older brother Ira soon joined him as lyricist for a string of shows that climaxed with the Romantic comedy Girl Crazy (1930), featuring the mega-hit number, “I Got Rhythm”; and the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, the political satire Of Thee I Sing (1931). Gershwin’s masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, premiered in 1935. Though its composer intended it as grand opera, Porgy has also been staged as a musical.

The post-Cohan sound that emerged in Broadway songs from the 1920s and ‘30s, and which would set the style for decades to come, was due in large part to the influence of Yiddish theater and Jewish liturgical music. Kern and Gershwin came from Jewish families, as did the most popular of the era’s Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Irving Berlin. In his book, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish, author Jack Gottlieb chronicles the effect this heritage had on American popular song and on Broadway. A second influence came from the popular operettas of the day, which imitated their European forebears. The Hungarian-born composer Sigmund Romberg gave a slight American twist to the popular work of Vienna’s Franz Lehar and came up with three hit Broadway operettas: The Student Prince (1924); The Desert Song (1926); and The New Moon (1929). His collaborator for the last two was the young scion of a prominent New York theater family, Oscar Hammerstein II.

These two influences came together in arguably the most important musical prior to the 1940s, Showboat (1927). With music by Kern and book and lyrics by Hammerstein, Showboat took a giant step toward blending the musical styles of operetta and American popular song that would dominate the coming “Golden Era” of the American musical. In songs such as “Old Man River,” Kern and Hammerstein moved into the realm of dramatic expression through musical means. But Showboat spawned no progeny, and the musical remained largely a vehicle for hit songs and showy dance routines.

Starting the late 1920s, Broadway songwriting got a shot of sophistication from Cole Porter, an independently wealthy, Yale-educated composer who turned to the theater as an outlet for his witty lyrics and sensuous melodies. His more provocative songs included “Let’s Do It” and “Love For Sale.” His 1934 show, Anything Goes, which featured one of Porter’s biggest hits, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” is one of only a handful of pre-1940 musicals still produced regularly. In the 1930s, Porter’s elegance balanced Berlin’s directness in such hits as “Always,” “Heat Wave” and “God Bless America.” In their Broadway shows, Berlin and Porter concentrated on writing hits rather than on dramatic expression. In 1940, the form was poised to transform into a viable musico-dramatic form. The man who at last pushed the musical into a place where all elements worked toward a single dramatic end was the middle class son of a New York physician, a composer with a gift for writing engaging melodies and a vision of the Broadway musical as a legitimate art form.

The career of composer Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) encompassed three distinct stages in the history of 20th century musical theater. From 1922 to 1942, Rodgers worked with lyricist Lorenz Hart on traditional, variety entertainment-oriented shows; from 1942 to 1960, he partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II, sparking the musical’s Golden Age; and from 1960 on, Rodgers worked with a variety of lyricists in an atmosphere that found the musical theater in decline. Rodgers and Hart composed musicals that moved the form slowly from loosely linked musical numbers toward integrated musical plays in which both song and dance served the story. Along the way, Rodgers and Hart contributed to the American popular song catalogue with such hits as “Manhattan,” “Where or When,” “Johnny One Note,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” For their the 1936 show, On Your Toes, Rodgers composed a freestanding ballet that was an integral part of the plotline: Slaughter on Tenth Avenue went on to become a standard of the ballet repertoire, and a favorite subject for choreographers throughout the decades.

By 1942, Hart’s health, exacerbated by alcohol, was playing played havoc with the team’s ability to write. Rodgers was restless to expand and deepen the form of the musical, to weld book, music and lyrics into a single, integrated work of stage art, and Hart wasn’t the man for the job. Rodgers’ favorite composer, Jerome Kern, had made the boldest move so far in the direction of an integrated show when he and Oscar Hammerstein wrote Showboat in 1927. Naturally enough, Rodgers sought out Hammerstein as his new collaborator, and Hammerstein, coming off an 11-year string of flops, eagerly said yes.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first show together did more to change the direction of American musical theater than any other in history. Oklahoma! (1943) blew down the doors that held the musical back from legitimacy. Nothing was put into the script and score that didn’t serve the end of relating story, character and theme. Instead of opening with a big chorus number with showgirls doing high kicks – typical for shows of the time – Oklahoma! opened with the silhouette of a woman churning butter and the sound of a cowboy singing about what a beautiful morning it was. A newspaper review during the show’s out-of-town tryouts was headlined “No Girls, No Gags, No Chance.” But when the curtain rang up March 31, 1943, at the St. James Theatre, the entire history of the musical was transformed. Popular and critical reception was glowing, and Oklahoma! set new artistic standards for the form.

It also started a torrent of new work. The next 20-plus years were a golden era of Broadway musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein went on to write Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), Flower Drum Song (1958) and The Sound of Music (1959). In 1944, America’s most spectacular young musical talent, Leonard Bernstein, made his Broadway composing debut with On The Town. Working with a range of lyricists, Bernstein went on to compose three more distinctive and important shows: Wonderful Town (1953), Candide (1956) and one of the form’s most important works, West Side Story (1957). The team of book writer/lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe enjoyed success paralleling that of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lerner and Loewe gave Broadway Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1951), My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960).

National enthusiasm for the Broadway musical meant that touring companies took all these and other hit shows from New York to the far reaches of the 50 states. It also drew songwriters from Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley to New York to work in the new form. Hollywood songwriter Frank Loesser contributed Guys and Dolls (1950), The Most Happy Fella (1956) and How To Success in Business Without Really Trying (1961). Jule Styne, another Hollywood veteran and one of Frank Sinatra’s favorite “saloon song” writers, moved to New York and penned the music for Bells Are Ringing (1956) and Gypsy (1959). Meredith Willson, a former member of John Philip Sousa’s famous band and a sometime Tin Pan Alley songsmith, wrote music and lyrics for one mega-hit, The Music Man (1957). The young songwriting team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross turned out two hits back-to-back -- 1954’s Pajama Game and 1955’s Damn Yankees -- before Ross died suddenly, only months after Damn Yankees opened.

It seemed the musical had just hit its stride and that the hits and the excitement around them would go on forever. But American culture was changing, and with that change, musical theater’s Golden Age would come to an end. After Hammerstein’s death in 1960, and especially following the rise of rock as the dominant popular music in the next decade, the musical took on a different character. The age of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, and Frank Loesser exited to make way for The Beatles, Hendrix, and The Doors. As late as 1961, the best-selling album of the year was a Broadway cast album (Camelot). After that, shows and hit songs started to go their separate ways. The big Broadway hits of the mid-1960s were a last gasp of the old form: Hello, Dolly! (1964; music and lyrics by Jerry Herman); Fiddler on the Roof (1964, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick); Funny Girl (1964, music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill), The Man of La Mancha (1965, music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion) and Cabaret (1966, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb).

In 1967, an attempt was made to graft the new popular sound onto the Broadway stage in Hair. Though it enjoyed good box office and a long run, Hair failed to remarry popular music and the musical. Meanwhile, two songwriters who would become Broadway’s major players were just beginning. As Oscar Hammerstein’s protégé, Stephen Sondheim had a leg up in the business. At age 27, he wrote the lyrics for Bernstein’s West Side Story, followed tow years later by the lyrics for Styne’s Gypsy. But Sondheim was also trained as a composer, and at last in 1962 he made his debut as composer (as well as lyricist) with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The rest of the ‘60s were largely dormant for him, but in 1970, Sondheim and book writer George Furth wrote Company, the first of what would be called “concept musicals,” or shows in which songs and dialogue are hung around the framework of a theme or concept, rather than a plotline.

Sondheim followed with Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976) and Sweeney Todd (1979), plus many others. He continues to write today. Sondheim writes both “concept” musicals and book shows with plots: Sweeney was a book show, while in Pacific Overtures, the concept of Japan becoming Westernized served as a framework. The concept musical that would prove to be the biggest hit, however, was not Sondheim’s. A Chorus Line (1975, music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban) broke box office records of the time, running for 6,137 performances. The concept of A Chorus Line didn’t originate with a writer, but with the show’s choreographer, Michael Bennett.

Across the Atlantic, the American musical had taken hold and grown its own fans and practitioners. Noel Coward, England’s Cole Porter, scored musicals, and the English team of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse combined the musical with English music hall to come up with Stop The World, I Want to Get Off (1961). But Andrew Lloyd Webber virtually ransomed the musical comedy for England, causing a tidal wave of English musicals transplanted to Broadway that some have called the “second British invasion” (the first was the Beatles and Rolling Stones in the ‘60s). Starting in the 1970s with Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita (both with lyrics by Tim Rice), Lloyd Webber created a series of musicals that at first pushed back the form’s musical boundaries and later retracted them. His two biggest hits so far are Cats (lyrics adapted from the poetry of T.S. Eliot, 1981) and The Phantom of the Opera (Lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, 1988). Phantom is still running on Broadway as of January, 2008.

In 1996, composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson re-introduced the language of rock to the Broadway musical with the hugely popular Rent. Rock remains rare on Broadway, with the 2007 hit Spring Awakening a major exception. Soul and gospel music is equally hard to find in the musical; exceptions include Dreamgirls (Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen, 1981) and The Color Purple (Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, 2005).

Musicals since the year 2000 have been dominated by “Jukebox” fare, in which pre-written songs are strung into a show, such as Mamma Mia, based on the songs of the pop group Abba; and musicals based on popular movies, including Hairspray (2002, music by Marc Shaiman, lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman) and Mel Brooks’ The Producers (2001). Some songwriters continue to write outside those limitations, however, including composer-lyricists Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, 2003), Jason Robert Brown (The Last Five Years, Off-Broadway 2002), William Finn (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, 2005) and Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza, 2004); and the team of composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens (Ragtime, 1998 and Seussical The Musical, 2000).

The musical today is at a crossroads. Jukebox shows are easier sells than original work, and songwriters are fighting to maintain a distinct style in the face of ever-cheapening popular music. But at 142 years old, the American musical is, as theatrical forms go, still young. Anything could happen.

Overheard the other night at a concert, spoken by a woman seated nearby: "I wanted to be a painter. Then I went to Paris and made the mistake of visiting the Picasso Museum. I phoned by dad and told him, 'Why bother!? I'll never be that good.'"

I've heard similar sentiments from others, including my oldest son, who writes music but is aware that others - many of them great - have gone before. "I hate Bach!" he said to me recently. "I could never write like that."

If you're any sort of artist, you've probably gone through the comparison stage of development in which comparing your work to the work of X, Y and Z makes you turn ashen. It's only natural, if you are, say, a composer, to consider the great line of masterpiees and master composers strecthing back hundreds of years and feel...inferior. Classical music suffers particularly from this, since composers are aided in their inferiority complexes by classical performers, who are notoriously quick to say things like, "Why are you writing a piano sonata when Beethoven already wrote 32 of them?"

Natural this is -- and fatal. Don't even go there. To think that you could be no more than a pale copy of someone else is a sure path to failure. The idea, anyway, is not greatness, and certainly not greatness on the scale of a Bach or a Picasso. It's making the art you love and need to make. Whatever you create, it will be a new entity, something uniquely yours that no one else could have brought into the world. If you have something to say through the art you make, it won't make a bit of difference that you didn't invent Cubism or lift the art of fugue to transcendental heights.

If you are a young artist, get through the comparison stage as swiftly as possible. Note the great artists who went before, absorb the work they did. And then forget them.

- KLF

PS - Come to think of it, with new art being made on YouTube by amateurs (folks who may never have heard of cubism or cared to know what a fugue is), and with this new art being consumed by millions of casual listeners and watchers over the Internet, is it even relevant to think about, let alone compare oneself to, the great artists of the past?

For years – decades, really – I’ve been boring friend and foe alike with my notion that we are headed toward a “high-tech Dark Age,” in which dumbed-down human beings will enjoy the physical advantages of technology but be at the mercy of that same technology to feed them “culture” and ideas: a well-fed world without a soul, i.e., Hell.

Now comes British scholar Susan Blackmore to confirm my prognostications. Blackmore sees a future in which humans are overrun by memes – infectious fed to them by machines that create all the ideas, the art and the music.

And, guess what? It’s a good thing!

In a story at Wired (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/ted_blackmore) Blackmore posits as “inevitable” the rise of silicon-based machines that will rule the culture by inventing and passing on memes through various cultural objects. A meme is defined in the story as “ an idea or thing that is passed from person to person and is either adopted for its usefulness or other purpose -- in some cases becoming a wildly popular idea that can't be stopped -- or abandoned to die a quick and ignoble death. A meme can be a song or snippet of a song, a dance, an urban legend, an expression or behavior, a product brand or even a religion.”

Until now, human beings have created and controlled the memes. But soon, Blackmore avers, “there's going to be evolution of memes out there that is totally out of our control.”

We now software that “mixes up ideas and produces an essay” and “neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting.” Soon, Blackmore believes, machines will do all the creating and all the selecting of cultural objects and the memes they convey “because evolution by natural selection is inevitable.” Wired asked her what such a society would look like. She responded:

“Well, it will look like humans are just a minor thing on this planet with masses (of) silicon-based machinery using us to drag stuff out of the ground to build more machines. We are so ego-centric. We think of ourselves as the center of the universe. We need to do a flip and see us as a player in a vast evolutionary process, which we're not in control of.”

Human beings are jus machines themselves, Blackmore says. Free will and even consciousness itself are “illusions.” Therefore, when one machine (humans) stops making and selecting the memes – stops making and selecting the culture – and another machine (the silicon-based kind) starts making them, this will simply be a blip on the old inevitable evolutionary journey to God Knows – excuse me – Evolution Knows Where.

Big deal. Get used to it.

I call Dr. Blackmore’s attention to A Clockwork Orange, a novel by her countryman Anthony Burgess. (The movie doesn’t count; Kubrick changed the ending.) The book is structured in Sonatina form. (Burgess was a composer as well as an author.) Sonatina is a musical form in which themes are presented that begin in one key – C major, say – and end halfway in another key (G major, for instance). Then the entire set of themes is presented again, starting in the new key, but with the important difference that, in their progress, they alter slightly so as to conclude the second half, and the entire piece, in the home key (C major in our example). In A Clockwork Orange, the hero Alex undergoes a series of experiences in the first half, which are repeated in the second half, but with important differences that shift the action and the underlying humanistic theme of Burgess’ novel. In both halves, Alex encounters an old man, comes to a certain wealthy man’s home, fights with his friends, etc., but the first-half and second-half actions differ in the details and, more importantly, in how Alex, who has undergone massive internal change, engages with the others and how he reacts to his environment.

What happens midway in the novel, of course, is Alex’s reprogramming. A mere machine with only the appearance of being organism – “Am I nothing more than a clockwork orange?” he protests – Alex is subjected to what amounts to repair by the State. He is programmed to hate violence and love passivity, with the result that he abandons the gang mentality of his first-half actions, but also loses the creative urges and love of beauty (“Ludwig van” Beethoven is his musical god) that make him a human. The initial “key center” is announced in Alex’s first words, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” The question is a statement of choice, of free will. This is lost halfway through, as the “key” changes to the mechanistic manipulations of Alex’s torturers. In other words, the key of free will that begins the book arrives halfway at the new key of physical determinism. Then the events start all over again, but from the new perspective -- in the new “key” -- of Alex having been programmed. As the second-half events proceed, they slowly find their way back to the home key, as free will is once more asserted.

Now, what’s the point here? I can’t prove to someone like Blackmore that freewill or even consciousness exists. She is clearly sold on what Alex might call the “old Marx-like determinism bit.” Historical determinism is a matter of faith. There is no science to back it up; in fact, contemporary physics, which gives us such insights as the apparent existence of matter we can’t see ("dark matter") could probably form the solid foundation of a case for free will, or at least the impossibility of anything being “inevitable.”

But I can say that, just because we seem to be machines – clockwork oranges – doesn’t mean we ought to behave as if we are, or be treated as if we are. Blackmore and all determinists dismiss the normative – the realm of value – while accepting by default the value given by their own faith-based presuppositions. In other words, to assert that we are machines is one thing. But to accept that whatever happens to us as a result of being machines as “inevitable” is to assert a value judgment clothed in the pseudo-science of historical determinism. It’s a thinly veiled hypocrisy in which the hypocrite accepts asserts a normative position while denying – since value judgments must come from free will – the existence of the normative. “We are so ego-centric,” Blackmore sniffs. What is that but a value judgment?

This is the true “culture war”: A fight between the mechanists who view humans as clockwork oranges without need of human/spiritual input, and those who know better.

You know you’re middle-aged when you can recall a handful of superior concert experiences the like of which you doubt you'll ever hear equaled. My top concert memories tend to center on the New York Philharmonic, where I worked in the 1980s as a publicist; they include, but are not limited to, Mstislav Rostropovich performing the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations and the Haydn C Major Cello Concerto on the same program, Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, and conductor Pierre Boulez making radiant Debussy’s hitherto impossibly dense “Jeux.”

But another concert experience sticks out in memory for a very different reason. The piece was Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night,” and the performers were a sextet of string players assembled from the participants in the Grand Canyon Music Festival. (I can’t recall the year, but it was sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s.)

“Transfigured Night” is a late Romantic piece that pulls at the emotions as if the soul were taffy, leaving you feeling dissolved into a million atoms. After the performance accomplished Schoenberg’s aim of reducing me to countless little pieces, the concert broke for intermission. It was late on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, so I strolled outside just as dusk was settling over the horizon.

And there was the Grand Canyon.

And suddenly I was a single entity again.

Nature had made whole in me what art had pulled to bits. Two contrasting forms of beauty had done their disparate, yet interrelated jobs.

"Art" and "nature" used to be easily paired in casual conversation. Today, with technology playing so large and ubiquitous a role in the arts, with most of our music and images being delivered to us via digital media, art is so separated from nature as to seem unconnected.

But if you want to understand again how art and nature are siblings, listen to live music in a beautiful natural setting. The created world and the world we create are forever locked in some dialectic we will never manage to fathom.

It's been more than two months since last I blogged. The reason? That I'd have to tell you over a beer -- Fat Tire, perhaps, or a Sam Adams White -- in utmost confidence. (No, I wasn't in the looney bin, though sometimes it felt that way.) In any case, all is well, and here I am again, writing new entries for my readership -- both of you.

Seriously, I am amazed when this site gets as many as 8 or even 10 views on a given day. (The average traffic is two or three views daily.) It does make me wonder, though, just how may readers -- or how few -- I had in the old days when I wrote for major print media. How many people actually read those reviews of mine in The Arizona Republic and The Kansas City Star? More than two or three, certainly. But were those pieces truly read? Or were they only glanced at, skimmed, even misread? I recall talking to a few "readers" and getting the clear impression that they had read the headlines to my stories, but not the stories themselves. (At newspapers, headlines aren't even written by the same person who writes the story.) On the Internet, I at least know that people are looking for what I have to say. That means they probably also read what they find.

Here's a thought or two on Shostakovich, written originally for The Desert Advocate a couple years ago on the occasion of the composer's 100th birthday celebration:

Dimitri Shostakovich lived most of his life under Stalin. So did millions of others, of course, but unlike those millions, Shostakovich had a weapon with which to fight back: music. It’s an unlikely weapon, for sure. You can’t kill with it, you can’t maim with it, you can’t even defend yourself physically with it. For that matter, music without words – and words directed against the state in Stalin’s time would have resulted in the writer’s spending the rest of his life in a very cold place, far from friends and family – cannot express a political idea. You can’t say, in music, “State communism is killing us – stop!” Or…can you?
According to no less a thinker than Plato, you can use music alone to shift and even bring down political regimes. In a famous passage, the philosopher wrote: “The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.” To rewrite, changing focus without altering meaning: “If you wish to imperil the state, introduce a new kind of music.”

Could it be true? Can tanks and spies and financial corruption be brought low by melody, harmony, and rhythm? While Shostakovich can’t exactly be credited with the downfall of the Soviet Union, he nonetheless managed to reach a disparaged people and give them hope, through symphonies and string quartets. How did he lodge such a protest in music without words?

His Symphony No. 5 is a perfect example. (His most widely praised work, Symphony No. 5 has been recorded many times. Look for the classic CD by Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic.) At the heart of it is a slow movement of unbelievable grief, an unmistakable statement of universal sorrow that listeners would not have taken for anything but a portrait of their country’s condition. That movement is followed by what one critic has called “an MGM ending,” an Allegro of such absurdly high spirits that you think, “How can this possibly follow on the heels that incredible expression of emotional pain we just heard?” As a contemporary of the composer’s has observed, the absurdity is the point. Under Stalin, though things were dreary to horrifying, people were expected, even commanded, to be happy – or else! And so the ending of the Shostakovich Fifth is “a smile with a gun to the head,” as the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich has said. The people heard this – and they got it.

If today, in the United States, the Bill of Rights were to be suppressed, freedom abandoned and justice confounded, would America produce music – or art of any kind – to speak to that condition? The question rests upon an assumption that itself prompts another question. The assumption is that Americans would be aware that such things were happening; only, would they?

Soviet citizens were supremely alert to the destruction of their natural rights, primarily because nearly everyone was affected. Many Soviets slept with a packed bag by the door, in case the KGB should arrive at 3 a.m. and whisk them off to Siberia. This was an audience attuned to the coded messages sent them in Shostakovich’s scores. In Nazi Germany, the tyrant was more subtle, ripping the rights of some (Jews, communists, gypsies, homosexuals) while leaving the majority untouched and, therefore, complacent. No equivalent of Shostakovich arose in Germany to speak to the people, because the people did not want to hear.

Do Americans want to hear the truth? Would we recognize it if we heard it? If the occasion of tyranny arose and a Shostakovich tried to reach us with music, would he have an audience?

‘Tis the season of Tchaikovsky and Handel, the two classical composers America can’t live without – at least in the month of December. The holidays without "Nutcracker" and "Messiah" would be unthinkable. And yet, the former was a flop initially, and the latter was written for Easter, not Christmas.

Tchaikovsky was a self-tortured homosexual Russian who grew prematurely old with doubts about his own abilities. After he composed “Nutcracker,” he pronounced to a friend his severe disappointment with the score, saying “it contains no melody.” Today, that’s like saying Arizona sunsets have no color. But when something is new, the ears that receive it aren’t always ready to hear what’s truly there – even when the ears belong to the composer.

Tchaikovsky might have been aided in his negativity by what show people call “bad b.o.” – poor box office, that is. The initial “Nutcracker” wasn’t a much of a success. Compared to his earlier ballet hits, “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty,” it flopped miserably. Critics ravaged it. One sniffed, “For dancers there is rather little in it, for art absolutely nothing, and for the artistic fate of our ballet, one more step downward.” It was more than 20 years after the composer’s death that Russia took fondly to the final ballet score of its most famous composer.

It took even longer for America to catch on. The music was played by American orchestras in the excerpts known as the “Nutcracker” Suite, but it wasn’t until 1940 that Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo brought the actual ballet to American scores. It didn’t really catch on. But then, in 1954, George Balanchine decided the make “Nutcracker” a holiday feature of his New York City Ballet, the company he had founded after emigrating to the United States from Russia in the 1930s. New York City Ballet had become the epicenter of the first wave of ballet mania to hit the U.S. Dancers who graduated from Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, often moved to Oklahoma or Oregon or Arizona to start their own companies. They took “Nutcracker” with them, and by the 1970s, it was firmly established as the cash cow for most regional American dance companies.

If Tchaikovsky was the essence of dour, the composer of “Messiah” was of a different order entirely. If ever a classical composer was a savvy businessman, Georg Frederic Handel was it. Born in Germany, Handel picked up the Italian opera style in Italy and took it to London, where he made a name for himself in a foreign country as the master of a form borrowed from yet another foreign country. When, at length, the Italian style ran its course, Handel found himself without commissions and on the brink of poverty. He switched genres with the alacrity of a salesman dumping an antiquated line for the latest fad. The English loved oratorios – large-scale choral works that relate stories purely through music, without the benefit of staging. He wrote a couple as warm-up, and then launched into an oratorio that summarized the Christian religion in the King’s English: “Messiah,”

Premiered in Dublin at Easter, 1742, Handel’s “Messiah” was an instant success. The King of England was in attendance, and even stood up during the stirring “Hallelujah” Chorus, starting a centuries-long tradition. Over the centuries, “Messiah” became associated with Christmas, at least in America, even though “Hallelujah” is supposed to "happen" at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion.

Handel didn’t stop there. Looking around at London, he noticed a large Jewish population and immediately produced a Hanukkah oratorio called “Jeptha.” It sold huge.

I’ve often wondered how much Tchaikovsky and Handel would be raking in from royalties, were they alive today and their works still in copyright. A modest guess would be several million dollars annually.

Somewhere, the ghost of Tchaikovsky is shaking his head in disbelief at his own music's enormous popularity, while Handel’s ghost is figuring how to increase the cash flow from his stunning global fame.